A documentary to Tickle your fancy, or not

THE next Serial. The next Jinx. The next Catfish. Tickled will inevitably dance around each of these monikers in an effort to fit comfortably within the hype machine. Really, though, it’s all just shorthand for one simple fact: this is one of the year’s most unmissable documentaries. One that compulsively sparks discussion, one that lives for word-of-mouth notoriety. One that must truly be seen to be believed.

David Farrier, New Zealand’s leading entertainment reporter, has built a career on the search for life’s small eccentricities. When a friend linked him to a video of something called “competitive endurance tickling”, it seemed destined as a passing quirk; another of the countless bizarre things we encounter on the internet, snigger into nothingness, and then move on with our lives.

Having contacted the video’s creator, Jane O’Brien Media, for a brief interview on the subject of endurance tickling, Farrier could never have expected the reply he’d receive; a rampage of homophobic slurs against the openly gay journalist, soon descending into legal threats – something Farrier didn’t fail to see the irony of considering, as he says: “The sport did seem slightly... gay.”

In the pursuit of a momentary quirk, Farrier had unwittingly opened a can of worms that would soon lead him straight into the heart of America’s darkness. Indeed, what’s so surprisingly gripping about a documentary superficially premised on an underground tickling scene, is exactly what’s found hiding in the shadows: a mysterious figure who soon becomes emblematic of the greed and manipulation that’s so corrupted the heart of America, and a bracingly honest look at a flawed legal system that’s become such a focus of recent documentary endeavours.

The Independent spoke to Farrier, who co-directed the film with Dylan Reeve. While waiting for this interview, I started obsessing over whether you could die from tickling. Do you know? It’s funny, I thought about this at some point as well. You would eventually, because, just the exertion. I was tickled by Richard Ivey, the good tickler in the film (and owner of a tickling fetish website). I was strapped down in his tickling chair and tickled for 10 minutes, because part of his deal in giving me an interview was that he would do that to me. But it’s f***ing awful and so intense and I was aching for days afterwards, just because every muscle in your body contorts and tightens. So, yeah, I imagine if it happened for long enough, probably your heart would give out, or physically you’d be exhausted. Saying that, though, you’d probably faint and then your body would be relaxed. So, maybe you couldn’t die from tickling. I struggle with what exactly the biological purpose of ticklishness is, it’s such a strange thing. There was a moment when we were making the film when we wondered whether we’d go into the science of tickling and what makes you ticklish, but I think pretty early on Dylan and I, and our team, kind of decided that wasn’t the angle. It’s not even really a film about tickling in the end; it’s about this company and the lengths they go to to do what they do. Tickling in itself, you can’t tickle yourself; it’s impossible. It can only be done if you don’t know where the touch is going to come from. It’s a really fascinating thing. I can’t imagine you expected anything close to what went down, right? We had no idea where it was going to go, and the scale of where it was going to go. We had suspicions of certain things, but it was all very up in the air. We didn’t know who was who; we didn’t know who was real, who wasn’t real. And by the time we ended up in Muskegon, talking to MMA fighters about tickling, we were like: ‘What is going on?’ It’s crazy.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Some people think it’s so unbelievable that they’re convinced we had made a mockumentary. All the controversy around it – people turning up to screenings and heckling us – they think we’ve hired actors to turn up to screenings. People can’t believe it. But real life is always stranger than anything you could think up. And it’s just a case of that. It’s, like, right place, right time, right people. All the people involved that I knew, that came on board to help me; everything was just perfect. Dylan and I didn’t even know each other before this; we were Twitter friends. This type of documentary always makes me wonder – how common are these kinds of stories and experiences in the world? I marvel at the number of things like this, especially on the internet. You see something a bit weird, but you just don’t click on it, you kind of get distracted. If you did click that thing, or you did do that thing, you could probably find similar crazy worlds that exist. Except that you’re a busy person and don’t always do that. It just happens that I e-mailed this company and posted on their Facebook wall and was persistent; and they instantly bit back and it just snowballed. So, I think there are things like this everywhere beneath the surface, but we just don’t know. With the likes of and

there’s this sudden surge of documentaries having real-world impacts on the legal system. Do you see the same thing happening here? It’s interesting you say that, because part of the intent of making the film was to expose what was going on, and hopefully some change would come from it. I don’t know of any ongoing investigations at the moment; but I think when people walk out of the theatre, people do feel an unease that justice hasn’t been done, and it’s my hope that that kind of reaction will lead to some kind of a change.

There are things we expose in the film – no one’s been murdered – but there are definitely things going on that aren’t right and in some very legally murky territory. So it’s my hope that something will eventually happen. But at the very least, if someone’s thinking about doing a competitive endurance tickling competition, they’ll at least Google that and find out about the other side to it. That’s my hope. – The Independent